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Lot Essay
Once the German declaration of hostilities against Russia was announced on 1 August 1914, igniting the First World War, Alexej von Jawlensky–Russian-born and once a junior officer in the Czar’s army—was given forty-eight hours to abandon his home in Munich and leave his adopted land, having lived and painted there for almost two decades. He, his family, and close friend the painter Marianne von Werefkin, also Russian, taking only what they could carry, arrived on 3 August in Lindau on Lake Constance to board a Swiss ferry that would transport them into exile. Under military escort, enduring jeers from townspeople along the way, they left Germany.
This devastating turn in fortune, the humiliation of the experience, and moreover the ensuing tragedy of pan-European war and the revolution in Russia, altered the course of Jawlensky’s life and art. In Das blasse Mädchen mit grauen Zopfen (“The Pale Girl with Gray Braids”), the artist continued his signature, pre-war series of expressive women’s heads, while contemplating a more introspective and spiritual sense of the world, and the nature of his response to the chaos into which it had descended.
Jawlensky and his family circle resettled in the lakeside village of Saint-Prex. “It was very tiny, our house, and I had no room of my own, only a window which I could call mine,” he later reminisced. “I tried to continue painting as I had in Munich, but something inside me would not allow me to go on with those colorful, powerful, sensual works. My soul had undergone a change as the result of so much suffering... I had to discover different forms and colors to express what my soul felt” (quoted in Alexei von Jawlensky, exh. cat., Neue Galerie, New York, 2017, p. 51).
Using his window as a frame, Jawlensky painted during late 1914-1916 some 150 “Variations on a landscape theme.” The artist employed for the first time in his work a serial procedure, such as Robert Delaunay had done in his pre-war Fenêtres sur la ville paintings, one of which Jawlensky owned. In these “songs without words,” as Jawlensky called them, stemming from deep inner necessity–in the manner his friend Kandinsky had ardently advocated–he verged on the modernist ideal of pure painting. “I gradually found the right colors and form to express what my spiritual self demanded” (ibid., p. 52).
Jawlensky also began to paint female heads once again, only a few in 1915, then nearly two dozen more in a flush of enthusiasm during 1916. He retained in Das blasse Mädchen the strong pre-war contours drawn in black paint, while altering his formerly aggressive Fauve and expressionist battery of color to manifest the more subtle contrasts of ethereal, pastel tints. The presence of a young art student Jawlensky met in the autumn of 1916—Emmy Scheyer, whom he nicknamed “Galka” (“jackdaw,” for her black hair)—contributed to his renewed emphasis on the female visage. These paintings evolved into his next series, the Mystischer Kopf (“Mystical Head”). Henceforth, Jawlensky’s main subject would be “the human face, the divine in the human…[the artist believed] ‘a work of art is God made visible’” (M. Jawlensky et. al., op. cit., 1992, p. 16).
Greta Garbo collected Jawlensky in depth, a group now referred to as “The Garbo Jawlenskys” by Angelica Jawlensky Bianconi, a keeper of the Jawlensky Archives in Locarno. Garbo acquired her Jawlenskys from noted dealers in Los Angeles, New York, and in Germany and Switzerland, including Leonard Hutton and Dalzell Hatfield during the 1960s and 1970s. Garbo’s friend, screenwriter and co-star in the German version of Anna Christie, Salka Viertel, ran a salon for the German and Austrian expatriate community at her home in Santa Monica. As a result, Garbo would have crossed paths with Galka Scheyer, who was Jawlensky’s representative in California at the time.
This devastating turn in fortune, the humiliation of the experience, and moreover the ensuing tragedy of pan-European war and the revolution in Russia, altered the course of Jawlensky’s life and art. In Das blasse Mädchen mit grauen Zopfen (“The Pale Girl with Gray Braids”), the artist continued his signature, pre-war series of expressive women’s heads, while contemplating a more introspective and spiritual sense of the world, and the nature of his response to the chaos into which it had descended.
Jawlensky and his family circle resettled in the lakeside village of Saint-Prex. “It was very tiny, our house, and I had no room of my own, only a window which I could call mine,” he later reminisced. “I tried to continue painting as I had in Munich, but something inside me would not allow me to go on with those colorful, powerful, sensual works. My soul had undergone a change as the result of so much suffering... I had to discover different forms and colors to express what my soul felt” (quoted in Alexei von Jawlensky, exh. cat., Neue Galerie, New York, 2017, p. 51).
Using his window as a frame, Jawlensky painted during late 1914-1916 some 150 “Variations on a landscape theme.” The artist employed for the first time in his work a serial procedure, such as Robert Delaunay had done in his pre-war Fenêtres sur la ville paintings, one of which Jawlensky owned. In these “songs without words,” as Jawlensky called them, stemming from deep inner necessity–in the manner his friend Kandinsky had ardently advocated–he verged on the modernist ideal of pure painting. “I gradually found the right colors and form to express what my spiritual self demanded” (ibid., p. 52).
Jawlensky also began to paint female heads once again, only a few in 1915, then nearly two dozen more in a flush of enthusiasm during 1916. He retained in Das blasse Mädchen the strong pre-war contours drawn in black paint, while altering his formerly aggressive Fauve and expressionist battery of color to manifest the more subtle contrasts of ethereal, pastel tints. The presence of a young art student Jawlensky met in the autumn of 1916—Emmy Scheyer, whom he nicknamed “Galka” (“jackdaw,” for her black hair)—contributed to his renewed emphasis on the female visage. These paintings evolved into his next series, the Mystischer Kopf (“Mystical Head”). Henceforth, Jawlensky’s main subject would be “the human face, the divine in the human…[the artist believed] ‘a work of art is God made visible’” (M. Jawlensky et. al., op. cit., 1992, p. 16).
Greta Garbo collected Jawlensky in depth, a group now referred to as “The Garbo Jawlenskys” by Angelica Jawlensky Bianconi, a keeper of the Jawlensky Archives in Locarno. Garbo acquired her Jawlenskys from noted dealers in Los Angeles, New York, and in Germany and Switzerland, including Leonard Hutton and Dalzell Hatfield during the 1960s and 1970s. Garbo’s friend, screenwriter and co-star in the German version of Anna Christie, Salka Viertel, ran a salon for the German and Austrian expatriate community at her home in Santa Monica. As a result, Garbo would have crossed paths with Galka Scheyer, who was Jawlensky’s representative in California at the time.